If you missed my performance on Sunday, watch the recording on YouTube or listen to the audio on SoundCloud. Go on! Play it while you read! Could be fun!
Nobody actually "missed" the performance, because I decided not to do it live. There's a level of stress around playing live that can be kind of constructive, and I was planning to stream up until about an hour before it would have been time to go live, at which point I just decided not to! I had already been thinking that it might be nice to get into a habit of releasing twenty minutes of a non-live single-take performance every week, so this is instead the start of that.
I think it went pretty okay. I didn't really plan anything, but I spent maybe six hours over the prior few days playing with this specific setup, and I learned some new things about some pieces of gear I've had for years, which felt nice and exciting. I was so tempted to swap things in and out and try different combinations of synthesizers and effects and whatever, but I forced myself to stick with this one layout and get to know it a little. I don't really have the discipline for mastery, but I am at least trying to linger a while.
The biggest goal was to make something that doesn't sound like anything I've made before, and I think that was a success. This definitely isn't dance music.
I included a little trumpet, which was probably premature but I'm really happy I did. It sounds pretty bad, because I have not practiced it enough, but it added a human element that I didn't even realize was so sorely missing from my music. The variations in timbre one can get from a wind instrument without even trying is so great. It's sent me on a little side quest to inject more expression into the electronic parts of my next piece of music.
So I bought an expression pedal. I'm not sure exactly what I'll use it for yet, but there's lots of things on the desk that would happily accept it so that I can affect some aspect of a sound by rocking my weight instead of (or in addition to) turning a knob. Being able to use another part of my body to semi-intentionally manipulate some sound will hopefully go a long way to humanizing some of this.
I also bought an MPE controller, an Exquis, but I am returning it. The keys are too mushy and it doesn't feel good to play. Going to try something else. Maybe a Launchpad Pro, which is not fully MPE, but the pads are pressure-sensitive.
One other thing that I think worked really well on this piece: the bassline was mostly random, but the randomization was pretty constrained. Specifically, I was playing two eight-step sequences in an AAAB pattern, which meant that there was lots of nice musical repetition even when I was rolling the dice. A cool and unintended side effect of that on this particular sequencer is that when I randomize the pattern, the change gets cleared when the pattern chain moves to the next pattern, meaning I can add in little accents or flourishes that only happen once. At its best it sounded like a real bassist trying a little thing at a turnaround or whatever. I'll be exploring this concept some more.
LaunchPad Pro has a built-in four-track sequencer which could be nice with this technique. Maybe I'll swap the keyboard for a LaunchPad in the next performance!
What else is going on? You might have noticed that I've been neglecting the diorama, and my self-imposed deadline for that project is next week. I think I've been avoiding it because I don't like the scene I was developing. I placed an arbitrary constraint on just pushing forward with an idea I had already devised a little and it was not exciting me. I am still committing to making a small scene to put outside by the end of next week! It's just going to be some critters in a forest instead! I love critters in a forest!